Websites

Kim Il Sung University, North Korea’s most prestigious seat of higher learning, has become the first university in the country to launch a website on the global Internet.

The site is available in Korean and English and is being served from a computer in Pyongyang. It joins a handful of other websites that are run by the North Korean government and accessible from outside of the country.

The site, dprktoday.com, offers an animated tour through the customs and culture available in the so-called hermit kingdom. A short film on the homepage welcomes prospective visitors, provides a handy locator of More >

Kwangmyong, North Korea’s online information service, has been upgraded.

The network serves scientific and technological information and has been expanded with a new search function that includes a translation function, according to a recent article on Naenara, the website of Pyongyang’s Korea Computer Center.

The article doesn’t go into great date on what exactly is new, but reports:

“Pak Sun Hyok and other programmers of the Information Technology Department set a goal of developing a function capable of referring to databases in different languages at one click with one Korean question through the automatic question-and-translate function and the immediate translating function More >

The Korea National Insurance Corp., North Korea’s state insurance company, has its own website.

The company, which in the past has been accused of orchestrating international insurance fraud, offers basic information about itself and its financial health. While the site appears to be new, the information on it in both English and Korean dates to only 2012.

The official financial information shows a business that’s growing — just be sure to read the chart from right to left — with the amount of premiums and net worth up every year since 2008. But net profits have been sliding in recent years, down 40 percent in More >

North Korea has strict controls on internal movement, a scarcity of private car ownership and almost no Internet users. And now it’s also got satellite navigation through Google Maps.

The service is available through the web and mobile apps and allows users to calculate travel time by car or foot between points of interest in the Google database. It’s limited to roads that have already been mapped out on the service.

South Korea’s Ministry of Unification will launch on Monday a new web portal focused on North Korea.

The North Korea Information Portal, or NK Info for short, is intended to provide South Koreans with up to date information on the DPRK, the Unification Ministry said.

Information on the site will be divided in several main sections: political, military, economic, social, cultural and education.

Within those sections, subsections will further organize the available data.

For example, within the political category there will be sections covering the main ideology of the DPRK, its political system, its power structure and significant figures and its efforts in diplomacy.